Cork'd

If you love wine, want to catalog your wine cellar, or just get a feel for what other people think about the wines you're drinking, you should check out Corkd. I've been using this awesome free site for around a year now (only since I turned 21 of course ;-)), it's a great site that lets you read and write reviews, take personal notes, or just keep track of wines you've tried or want to try.

Cork'd can also log all the wines in your cellar for you with vintages, varietals, scores, average prices, reviews, and quick easy to use tasting tags (for example: cherry, honeydew melon, raspberry, apple, et cetera). Once you have an account, get some drinking buddies and recommend wines to each other! It's a great way to find the best wines at reasonable prices, let someone else try them first... :)

Afloat Goes 2.0

Leopard is great, but with Leopard came the inability to have transparent windows anymore :(. Until Afloat 2.0 was released just recently! The old Afloat was great, but it was broken when Apple upgraded to 10.5 Leopard.

Afloat is an app that lets you make windows transparent and adds various other superfluous effects to all cocoa apps.

A quick FREE download and you'll all ready to go! Just open up any cocoa application (Safari and iChat for example) and click on the "Window" menu item. Any option with a little cloud next to it is a special Afloat add on.

Facebook Chat

Facebook used to be clean and easy to use, that's why pretty much every college student told MySpace where to stick it. Facebook was then opened to the public, which wasn't too much of a difference for most people. THEN applications were brought to Facebook... This caused a pretty big uproar and is still as issue among many students. The next big thing that Facebook just publicly released this morning is chat.

You could always see who was on Facebook right now by going to "Friends > Who's Online" but now you can go one step further and talk to those that are online right away. The chats are instant messages just like AOL Instant Messenger so there's no need to wait for a reply like in a personal message or wall post. Want to check it out? Go to Facebook right now, look on the bottom right corner of your window and you'll see the new chat box. Neat huh?

NOAA.gov Buoys

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is an organization funded by our wonderful government and they are diligent scientists that record everything there is to record having to do with water and weather in the US. The department I'm really excited about is the automated buoy information system. There are self sustained weather stations with solar powered accelerometers and computers that record and keep track of the movement of the water.

This recorded data is then sent by satellite back to home base and is actually posted on their website every 10 minutes!!! Wicked cool!!! The information that is recorded is ridiculously in depth too, the best parts are the height of the swells, the length of the period between swells, the water and air direction, water and air temps, et cetera. Check it out, there's even an RSS feed!

LED Magic

This is by far the most impressive stop-motion video I've ever seen, period. What's so interesting is that this project could have only been captured by long exposures (10 seconds each) due to the LED light sources and how they are being captured as pictures. Keep that in mind when you check out this film.

Panoramio

Yet another FREE Google service that is awesome! Panoramio is a great web based service that provides the same service as Flickr's geo tagging, except Google takes it one step farther, you can then see those tagged photos right in Google Earth when you view that area!!! Pretty cool huh?!?!

Here's what the site looks like


Here's what that looks like in google earth with a photo selected

Leopard Volume!

(From TUAW)
"Sure, you can use the volume key on your MacBook or Apple keyboard to do quick volume changes, but that doesn't adjust the volume that precisely. If you want to fine tune your volume, you have to either open System Preferences or click on the volume icon in the menu bar. However, you can also tweak the volume by holding down the option + shift keys and tapping the volume up/down keys on your keyboard.

As an additional note, you can also hold down the shift button while pressing the volume keys to mute the "pop" that you hear when pressing the volume key.

If you want to permanently silence the volume-adjust beeping, uncheck "Play feedback when volume is changed" in the Sound Effects preference pane and it won't bother you again (helpful for podcasting or other situations when you might need to adjust your volume on the fly)."

Calibrate Your Screen

Most people take their computer screens for granted. They don't realize the full potential is just a few clicks away! Leopard has a built in screen calibrator that will help you get your screen looking as color popping and accurate as possible!

Macworld has this slightly old, yet still accurate article on how to set up your screen quickly and accurately. It was a great help when trying to match my two screens so they were similarly and accurately displaying color.

Syslogd Process

If you're using Leopard's Time Machine, from time to time check out the ram/cpu usage on a process called "syslogd." It gets extremely high, the good news is all you have to do is kill the process and it restarts in a few seconds at its normal ram usage around 7MB. There are two ways to go about doing this without having to open Activity Monitor every time you notice this problem. The first way uses the Terminal, just type in sudo killall syslogd then enter in your password. like this:

Or you could write an Applescript that says the following:

This is what I do because I use the scripts menu item and I can access and run this and other commonly used scripts with just a quick click. I like menu items a lot, what can I say? :)

Flickr Pro

We all know about Flickr, the website for organizing and sharing our photos. Most people don't actually have an account though. I got a free account a little over a year ago to host some photos, but recently I decided that I was going to use Flickr a lot more, so I upgraded to a pro account. Lets compare the differences: with a free account you get a 100MB a month upload limit, you are allowed 3 photo sets and your photos are cut off at the 1024x768 size, images under 5MB each only.

With the Flickr account you are given unlimited storage, unlimited photo sets, a permanent online archive for your photos, ad free browsing and sharing, account and photo statistics, and the photo quality has essentially no resolution limit.

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